With the pressure to decrease product development lifecycles, often with fewer resources, the challenges faced by embedded Linux developers have never been greater. Semiconductor vendors have become developers of the core Linux technology that enables their hardware and fully exploits its feature set. Yet Linux developers still lose valuable cycles enabling the hardware, customizing their systems, and integrating other software and tools. Designers find themselves locked into early software choices, unable to fully leverage the power of the open source community, and without the right tools to customize the software to their specific application requirements.

MontaVista Linux 6 addresses these challenges by providing a complete embedded Linux development environment comprised of Market Specific Distributions, development tools, and the support and maintenance required by developers to fully leverage the semiconductor Linux technology and resources from the open source community. This revolutionary approach to embedded Linux fully aligns the embedded Linux supply chain for the first time. Embedded device developers maintain the quality, control, and consistency they require to deliver commercial-ready devices to market faster while having the flexibility to tailor their design to the specific application requirements.

“In the current market, customers are often forced to make a difficult decision on which Linux technology to start a project with: open source, their semiconductor partner’s Linux technology, or a commercial distribution. That decision always involves making compromises and can be difficult to move away from once development has begun,” said Jim Ready, CTO and Founder of MontaVista. “With the release of MontaVista Linux 6, we are taking a huge step forward in aligning the Linux supply chain, giving our customers the flexibility to start quickly, maximize their hardware investment, and harness the full power of Linux and the open source community. Our customers no longer have to settle or compromise.”

MontaVista Linux 6 is comprised of:

Market Specific Distributions

MontaVista Integration Platform

MontaVista Zone Content Server

MontaVista DevRocket 6

“The continued success of Linux in the embedded market will depend in part on the ability of developers to tailor Linux to new application platforms,” said Chris Rommel, Analyst in the Embedded Software & Tools Practice at VDC Research Group. “The Market Specific Distributions in MontaVista Linux 6 offer developers premium, supported solutions that are also feature-compatible with the semiconductor Linux technology, so that they can quickly initiate new product designs and limit unnecessary redesign. At the same time, the new MontaVista Integration Platform can help provide developers with the flexibility and control required to deliver products that are uniquely tailored to their target market.”

Market Specific Distributions (MSD) are new Linux distributions, built on a common framework, and optimized for the respective hardware platform and its target market. An MSD is designed to support the full breadth of functionality provided by the semiconductor vendor, be feature compatible with the semiconductor vendors’ Linux technology, and provide the value-add features and quality MontaVista is known for. Fully supported by MontaVista, MSD’s may be customized and optimized for the target application, allowing developers to easily create a tailored software distribution that fully exploits the hardware specific features.

The MontaVista Integration Platform is built on open source technology, and allows developers to easily extend and customize their software stack, while maintaining control over the build process With the Integration Platform developers can fetch and integrate code from other team members, outside vendors, or the broader open source community. Since it’s built on open source technology, the Integration Platform supports the standard recipe file formats used throughout the open source community. This unprecedented flexibility in a commercial solution enables developers to easily customize their software stacks at all levels, the kernel, device drivers, libraries and applications. Systems developers can consistently build all target-installed software from source – with just one command – and create multiple, reproducible build configurations, or perform incremental builds as required.

The MontaVista Zone Content Server delivers source code and other content dynamically to the Integration Platform, freeing the developer from the constant task of searching for new source code and updates. The developer can identify changes, updates, and dependencies in his code via the Integration Platform, with the option of incorporating these changes to his build environment.

MontaVista DevRocket 6 – the newest release of the MontaVista Eclipse-based IDE for platform and application development. DevRocket supports the new MontaVista Integration Platform, and MemTraq memory analysis, along with industry-standard tools for debugging, development, and system profiling.

MontaVista Linux 6 is in use by beta customers today, and will be generally available in July, 2009. For more information please visit http://www.mvista.com/mvl6.

About MontaVista Software
MontaVista Software, Inc. is the leader in embedded Linux commercialization. For over 10 years, MontaVista has been helping embedded developers get the most out of open source by adding commercial quality, integration, hardware enablement, expert support, and the resources of the MontaVista development community. Because MontaVista customers enjoy faster time to market, more competitive device functionality, and lower total cost, more devices have been deployed with MontaVista than with any other Linux. To learn more, please visit www.mvista.com

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States and other countries. MontaVista is a registered trademark of MontaVista Software, Inc. All other names mentioned are trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.